The present invention relates to transportation vehicles and more particularly to transportation vehicles with automatic cruise control systems.
Cruise control systems have been developed for a wide variety of vehicles and have evolved to include a variety of features. Typical cruise control systems function by applying engine power to maintain vehicle groundspeed at a driver selected speed, relieving the driver from manually adjusting the vehicle groundspeed. Additionally, cruise control systems may have additional functions such as maintaining a given following distance from a vehicle ahead, braking when vehicles ahead are slowing down or adapting to variable ground terrain.
However, such previously mentioned cruise control systems do not directly monitor or manage airspeed for vehicles as they travel over the ground. Existing systems perform functions such as maintain groundspeed, maintain following distance or adapt vehicle groundspeed to adjust for uphill or downhill gradients in terrain. Such approaches are improvements over manual control of vehicle groundspeed, but they are not always optimal for minimizing energy consumption, particularly over longer distances where significant headwinds or tailwinds can occur that can substantially increase or decrease vehicle drag.
Due to the significant demands to reduce consumption of energy in ground vehicles, it is therefore desirable to have an airspeed adaptive cruise control system to automatically lessen the effects of headwinds and capture the benefits of tailwinds.